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BSA Creates Piracy Statistics
JakiChan writes "According to this story on Yahoo! news the BSA commissioned a study that decided that 39% of all business software is pirated, down from 40%. The decline is attributed to the BSA's enforcement techniques. 'The piracy rate was calculated by comparing the researchers' estimates on demand with data on actual software sales.'" In other words, some guys sat in a room and decided that people probably wanted to buy ten copies of software, but only five were sold, so the piracy rate must therefore be 50%. By a similar process we can calculate that 99% of all ocean-front homes are pirated.
79% of all statistics are made up on the spot. My math professor always said so, so it must be true.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
"And for software, because every PC is a software copying machine, since inception we have had a problem."
He has a point, but it must be strange looking around and having a paradigm of fear/distrust spin on what he sees.
Reminds me of this saying "If a pickpocket meets a saint, he sees only his pockets".
The other subjective view is where they attribute the reported 1% decline to their own efforts. Sounds more like either statistical fluctuation or just a noisy unstable way of measuring year to year.
Esteem isn't a zero sum game
A meaningless statistic or the (Government/Big Business/Your Boss) believing it?
__________
Love conquers all... except CANCER
By a similar process we can calculate that 99% of all ocean-front homes are pirated Yarrr. There be many a pirate on the high seas.
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
Who's smoking crack here? There's no way to calculate how many times I downloaded Bryce off Kazaa or something like that, piracy is un-measurable!
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Yuck Fou
Otherwise the BSA is a worthless entity. Notice that they didn't say it decreased a lot, there's still much more work in the Fight Against Piracy, so please keep funding us, Mr. Gates. Eventually they'll stamp out piracy, honest, so can they please have another 100 million USD?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
They like to make up numbers. Same as "one pirated song costs us $X amount of dollars". I wonder how much of that piracy is highly priced productivity tools - Photoshop, Flash, 3DSMax, Visual Studio, etc etc, stuff that people can't really afford, so they are technically losing money, since it wouldn't have been bought in the first place.
I disagree - my statistics show that only 39% of /. trolls think that *BSD IS DYING, compared with 40% last year, therefore *BSD IS LESS DEAD that it was last year.
Oh, and for "statistics" read "numbers that I pulled out of my ass
Wouldn't 1% be within the margin of error? Especially since 39% is only an estimate[1]. For all we know, it actually went up 1%.
[1] The article says: "The study estimates that 39 percent of business software products in use last year were not legally obtained"
I've come to believe that you can learn a lot about a person or organization based upon their treatment of others. If one's mind is a world of sexual perversion, one sees child pornography in the innocent bathtime photos parents take of their kids. If one's mind is a prime example of a money-grubbing, to-hell-with-everyone-else attitude, one sees piracy in every PC.
In this case, it's apparent that the BSA and it's leaders are rapacious, greedy, amoral takers of other people's goods. They should be put away for their own safety and ours.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
I think he means that a lot of people WANT ocean-front homes, but few are SOLD. He's just trying to apply his logic in a wierd way.
If they did their stats similar to the stats over at distributed.net I think it would be alot more accurate. And it would also spur competition amongst the piraters. I think it would be cool to see who could pirate the most.
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I would like to apologise for the heinous crime of software copying. I promise to mend my ways and return to a good pirate lifestyle of murder, rape and pilage on the high seas
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What truth?
There is no dupe
Couldn't piracy also have fallen because of the sharp rise of open source software?
I don't steal things, I just borrow them from strangers for as long as I need them. The eyepatch is purely for aesthetic reasons....
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In effect, their piracy statistic is more made-up than most statistics, since they're just making up a number of how much pirated software is out there based on what they *think* would have sold.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
What of software that is released in the free software market? Wouldn't increased free software usage also decrease the overall percentage? Oh wait, I'm sure they didn't bother checking free software usage so they can keep piracy percentages at a relatively similar number to before the inception and mass utilization of free software. When someone downloads an average linux distribution, how many packages of free software do they get? That's certainly got to be adding to the numbers and decreasing the overall true number of piracy (i.e. pirated copies of software/all copies of software used). I'm sure they consider the usage of single-license software on more than one machine pirating, so this falls under "all copies of software used".
---- The geek shall inherit the Earth.
. . .but it seems to me that in any proper study you make reference to margins of error (which the Yahoo! story didn't mention), and I find it hard to believe that the reported 1% drop falls outside the margin of error.
This is all really silly.
Because the houses are on the Ocean, Pirates have access to them for Pirating. You would think Pirates would like to Pirate all the homes they can, but they can only get to 1 out of every 100 homes to pirate. But because they wanted to get to 99 out of 100 homes, the piracy rate is 99%.
Excellent logic no?
Do you Gentoo!?
I would attribute any real decrease in piracy to the fact that many Free software projects "matured" very recently. I walked into a meeting for the NDP riding executive in my area and heard half the room raving about how amazing OpenOffice.org is, and these people are not geeks. The other day AbiWord was raved about in Toronto Computes, a paper that usually focuses on proprietary software (and gives only a nod to Apple).
Microsoft has just started letting people use Office at home if their employer owns a copy. Free software is ready for business, and MS knows it.
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Read the slashdot title... "BSA Creates Piracy Statistics". No, they didn't gather, collect, or compile them... they "created" them.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Interesting that they came up with a piracy rate of 95% in Vietnam - given their probable margin of error, it's entirely possible that MORE THAN 100% of software in Vietnam is pirated. People in Vietnam WRITE software, just so they can steal it from THEMSELVES.
Kudos to the writer of the story, though, for NOT passing along the hugely overinflated "lost profits" number the report obviously included:
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And In this case, you are probably right. However, this is not really a person-specific trait, but rather an organizational culture thing.
There is a great tendency for organizations to develop a certain mindset (either positive or negative), and then they hire in people that exhibit that mindset in some way, and fire/get rid of those that dont "fit in". In the HR world, its known as hiring "right types", and you can usually determine the companies opinion on this by looking at how they operate.
Over the course of time, people in the organization start to believe everything that their co-workers and bosses are saying to them, and hence, they develop views in sync with the company/organization. In this case, I would bet that the BSA, since one of its primary goals is to destroy piracy, they only hired in, and then hightened/enhanced this strange, rapacious behavior. I can almost guarantee you, however, that inside the company this is the norm.
Ok. Have to remember, in reading future BSA press releases that
"It is welcoming news to learn that the worldwide software piracy problem has improved significantly..."
and
"However, it's critical to recognise that the industry is facing a spiralling Internet piracy problem."
are not mutually exclusive statements. I wonder if that trick would work in board meetings. "Cost projections have improved significantly" sure sounds a lot better than "Costs are spiralling out of control"!
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It's largely a matter of who you want to believe. The BSA stats aren't any more inaccurate than the RIAA stats on music piracy, Symantec stats on virus/worm damage, or ISP/pundit stats on the cost of spam.
For a group of people eager to believe that the "spam plague" allegedly costs us all billions, it is more than a bit hypocritical to summarily dismiss whatever numbers the BSA or the RIAA come up with.
It's all a matter of what you love to hate. When you're decided on that, the numbers will follow.
No, 100% of statistics are worthless, but 21.53% of all statistics are made up.
Side note.
Adding a decimal point increases the truth of any statistic. 82.34% of people say so.
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At least we now know what the "BS" stands for in "BSA".
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
I guess I was slacking last year. I'll do my best to get that back up to 41% next year. I PROMISE!
Ok. Some facts.
1. The economy is/was in a downturn.
2. BIG corps can more easily afford to ride this out.
3. BIG corps usually can afford licensing of software etc etc...
Now, assuming a lot of tiny tiny companies haven't sprouted that would pirate software, wouldn't it be somewhat obvious that software piracy would be down?
Just playing devil's advocate.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
the actual white paper is here
It starts from the premise of looking at software industry growth rates from 1996 to 2001 and predicting that even without piracy reduction, the growth of the software industry would be *greater* (in percentage terms) from 2002 to 2006.
Obviously after the bubble burst the IDC guys spent the last of their stock earnings on crack.
Must be all those 12-17 yr old boys working on their computer merit badges...
"Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer any more than I'm an ashtray" (Bob Dylan)
Before the BSA starts talking about hijacking stuff, perhaps they need to talk to these people about infringing on names.
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Okay BSA, here's a tip:
When the fruit of your efforts is less than the margin of error, it's time to rethink your strategy.
Homer: Aw, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. Forfty percent of all people know that!
If you can't beat them, arrange to have them beaten. -George Carlin
I think the way they come up with their numbers is taking the number of new computers sold each year, guessing how many are for the workplace, assuming every work computer uses Windows and Office and a ratio of how many use whatever other packages (Photoshop et.al) and how many are for professional homes, assuming all the home users use Windows and guessing from the home users what percentage uses Office ... then comparing that number to the number of sold licenses of Windows, Office, and whatever.
If Intel and AMD combined sell 100 million CPUs this year and Microsoft only sells 60 million seats of Windows, then 40 million computers are using pirated OS. Same sort of thing with Office, etc...
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
The bottom line is that these guys are claiming to have discerned a 1% drop in an area of the piracy chart that must inherently be extrapolated from real world data. Given that even the interpolated statistics based on the real world data would already have a margin of error of more than 1%, there's no F-ing way that you can discern a 1% variance in data they haven't even measured.
How convenient that the first two letters of the association's acronym are BS.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
They have to, since they don't actually go after larger businesses, only the tiny, five-or-six-person mom and pop shops.
When I was unfairly let go from my previous employer, I decided to hit 'em hard by contacting the BSA. As I was the Network Manager, I could tell them about pretty much every piece of pirated software, and I did. I went to the BSA site and filled out a report documenting hundreds of missing licenses for MS Office, MS Exchange, a number of Adobe products, and a few from Macromedia (all of their big vendor companies). I even documented how Lotus SmartSuite is installed on about 300 computers, yet we only had 4 legal copies, not to mention all the small shareware-type shit (like SnagIt and WinZip) that was installed on almost every PC without one legal license in the place.
I documented the "plan" we had in case of audit...it seems you can refuse them entry the first time they drop by for a visit, but they come back later that day with sherrifs and a warrant to force the issue. More than enough time for use to ghost a pirated-clean image on all the machines (using a pirated copy of ghost, of course). We even went to the trouble to compile a list of every machine that had pirated software so we could quicly decide which ones would need ghosting first.
Finally, I documented the little utility one of the members of the IT staff was forced to write ("it's written, or you're out of a job") to bypass the licensing restrictions of MS Terminal Services. I even gave them a link to the company's website where they could download it (it was up there so the salesmen could get it at home).
And, what happened? Nothing. For three months I called every week to see what the status was, and was told each time that there was nothing new to report. It was in the hands of the member companies. Finally, I was told that one of the member companies had decided not to pursue.
When I asked why, I was told they didn't have a reason, but it could be because: "the member company may already be investigating or negotiating with the company, the company may have some kind of site license, or the member company may have some other kind of relationship with the company in question." None of these were the case (I still have contacts in the IT department).
No, the truth is, the BSA simply can't walk into a large company and tell 500 people to get off their machines for a day while they're audited. It's logistically impossible. So, they advertise lots and lots of threats, send out "truce" notices, and make a lot of people worry about nothing.
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I am pretty sure that is how they do it. I have seen statistics from them showing how there are 1.68 new computers sold each year for every copy of (Windows or Office, take your pick) and if you do a little magic math (1/1.68 = .595) you see a 59.5% legitimate purchase rate, or almost exactly the 40% piracy rate they claim.
... but hey, there are lies, there are damn lies, and there are statistics.
OSS, Linux, StarOffice or whatever, and folks that retire a machine and migrate the software they paid to use all skew that number
It would be a pretty easy way to boil up numbers for 3rd world countries, just figure out how many computers get sent there in a given year, figure out how many copies of legit software get purchased, simmer on high for 5 minutes and Voila! cooked books.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer